I have several customers email servers that I spamfilter and then forward filtered email. The problem servers are Exchange servers. We run Exchange inhouse for ourselves on our local network and it is never a problem. It seems that these customer Exchange servers usually require many spamfilter send attempts before mail can be transferred from the queue. Is there a send from spamfilter.ini setting that I can adjust?

If anyone has some ideas on how to reduce my connection timeouts I would love to hear from you. My queue will stack up several hundred files at times before being cleared out.

Dwight

Replies: Posted By: LogSat
Date Posted: 10 August 2004 at 11:21pm

Dwight,

SpamFilter has some extra timeout options available in the SpamFilter.ini file, however they all relate to incoming emails, not outgoing. This is the first time we are made aware of such problems. If you can post some samples of the SpamFilter activity log showing the outgoing emails failing we may be able to see if there's anything that can be done.

Roberto F.LogSat Software

Posted By: LogSat
Date Posted: 11 August 2004 at 6:40pm

Dwight,

From the logfile of Aug 10 you sent, we see that there's only 7 such errors for the whole day. They all appear to be caused by a timeout (~23seconds) occurring when SpamFilter tries to forward the mail to your Exchange server. 5 of them occurr between 00:02:43 and 00:04:00, with 3 of those in the span of 6 seconds at 00:02:43, 00:00:49 and 00:02:49.

The above 3 or 5 consecutive timeouts do seem to indicate a real problem in the network connection from SpamFilter to Excahnge. Can you confirm that there were no firewall timeouts if a firewall is between the servers, or that Exchange was 100% available? Sometimes backups or scheduled virus scans can slow down Exchange so much that it temporarily stops processing emails.

7 such events in a day is a very low number, and is very common to have a few delivery failures. Such emails will be redelivered on the next queue flush.

To be a problem, there should be several dozens or hundreds of such events. If this is so, if you can forward us a logfile that has this many failures we can try to find the problem.

Roberto F.LogSat Software

Posted By: dcook
Date Posted: 12 August 2004 at 9:40am

Thanks for the reply Robert. It is not so much the "socket error #10060", but the large numbers of files that are piling up in the queue. The socket errors are really a result of a few delivery attempts from the queue that failed. I have seen emails stay in the queue for over an hour that were attempting delivery to an Exchange server. This causes my clients to call and say "important email is stuck on your server -- we have been expecting it and have not received it."

I have moved my queue flush interval to 3 minutes and that seemed to help a little. I am working with my clients to increase the number of incoming connections on their Exchange servers and I'll let you know if that fixes the issue. It appears to be a connection timeout issue to me. The issue is amplified if there are any files over 1mb -- smaller files seem to backup behind the large file and they get stuck. The logfiles do not at all enumerate the number of files held in the queue folder so I am doubtful as to if the logs will help you identify the issue itself. Any ideas would be appreciated.